R. Kelly Still Wants To Have Sex With Every Woman in the World, Unfortunately

June 1, 2009

R. Kelly hasn’t tested out his commercial might much since his 2008 acquittal on child pornography charges–12 Play, the follow-up to 2007’s Double Up, never came out–so the album-buying public has yet to get a chance to render a verdict on the continued viability of dude’s career. But he has occasionally tested us: in a BET interview last fall, Kelly responded to a question about his seeming penchant for underage girls with a question in kind. “When you say teenage how old are we talking?” he asked. “19? I have some 19-year-old friends but I don’t like anybody illegal if that’s what you’re talking about.” This prompted, among other people, HOT 97 DJ Funkmaster Flex to bug out on YouTube, where he pointed out, basically, that Kelly “was telling all of America he’s going to continue to do this, he’s been doing this, and he feels good about doing it.” Which seemed like a pretty fair gloss on it, really.

The music Kelly has released here and there since has been occasionally good–the post-Dream and mostly chaste “#1 Fan” is hard to argue with, and “Superman High” had a tremendous Willy Will beat, at least–but mostly autotuned and weird: the underwhelming “Take It To the Hotel,” his random remix of Kanye’s “Love Lockdown,” and the creepy Obama-homage “I Believe,” which appallingly equated Barack’s struggle to Robert’s. But more Kells is on the way: The Demo Tape, a remix mixtape hosted by DJ Drama and DJ Skee, is coming soon, and a handful of songs are already floating around the internet, including Kelly’s remix of Lil Wayne’s “Every Girl,” in which the conceit is, yup, “I wish I could fuck every girl in the world.”

Leaving aside the fact that the song’s just not that great–this is one of the greatest voices in the history of modern r&b: autotune just makes no sense for R. Kelly–it takes some audacity for Kelly to come out and say essentially that he wants to fuck somebody’s whole family, grandma (and the Statue of Liberty) included, in 2009. It’s hard enough to listen to old, classic R. Kelly without a bit of self-hate; having the guy out-and-out gloat post-trial about his tremendous and endlessly perverse libido is pretty much beyond what any of us should be asked to tolerate. On his Twitter, Fabolous, that font of 140 character wisdom, wrote yesterday: “i jus heard R. Kelly did a Every Girl Remix.. He should leave the fucking and girl subject alone 4 a minute.. Do another I Believe I Can Fly.” Agreed–or maybe just lay off the music entirely for a minute entirely, Robert, and instead think about all the different ways you can thank god for not being in jail right now.